Victor R. Bambeck - W8DFL - QSL Cards
I'm going to start as simple as I can: the W8DFL QSL card.
You might ask "what's a QSL card?" Well, I'm glad you asked.
A QSL card confirms the communication between two stations. Why? You just talked to the other station, why would you need to confirm it?Well, I think it's mostly an excuse to collect things from around the world -- a physical artifact of the ephemeral thing that is radio communication.That and you can get awards! Ok, so they're kinda silly awards. Like talking to a hundred countries or something. But it's something to hang on your wall. It's a target. The cards confirm that you talked to someone. You send them yours and they send you theirs.I don't think that Vic ever got an award... but it would be cool to see if he qualified for a DXCC, but it's going to be cool to check! We have almost 800 cards in the box that En got for Christmas from her uncle. I have them all scanned in and I'll be posting batches of them as I scan them in.It might seem boring, but wait until you see some of them. They're cool. They're old. They're from another era and it's interesting to imagine what things were back then. Before things like communism for instance. More on that later.Like a one cent stamp for a post card.But I'm going to start with the beginning.W8DFLHe told En's mom that you can remember it with "Dog Food Love." Whatever that means. ;-)In case you didn't catch it, Ennie is now W8DFL! She has her grandpa's old sign!To the old, to the new -- cheers!Random side note: I'm still working on how to arrange all this between Wordpress and SmugMug. One thing I do know is that all of the cards will be posted with 600 dpi images of all of them in SmugMug. I want to post them with as much detail as I can in case anyone wants to de some research on relatives and wants a momento or something. If someone wants one in even higher resolution I'll gladly oblige. Likewise if you really want one taken down (and have a good reason) I'll respect your wishes. Note though that things like addresses of amateur radio stations are a matter of public record so I'm not giving anything away in that regard.